Well, would you believe it—my marriage came back to life… after a home renovation. I’d honestly thought we’d forgotten how to feel anything at all. Sixteen years of marriage, you know? It’s like that old jumper at the back of your wardrobe: cosy, familiar, but not exactly keeping you warm anymore.
David and I had settled into a predictable rhythm: work, dinner, the odd chat before bed. No arguments, no drama—just coexisting. Calm, steady, almost like siblings. No sparks, no grand passions. Sometimes, I imagined us as two trees planted side by side: roots tangled up, but the branches stretching in opposite directions.
And then the renovation happened.
We didn’t plan it, really. Toby went off to summer camp by the seaside for the first time—two whole weeks! “Mum, I’m not a kid anymore!” our twelve-year-old declared, tossing light-up trainers into his suitcase. David and I stood on the platform waving at the departing train, and when we got back to our suddenly empty house, it hit us: now it’s just us, and these walls that remember when we were different people.
To speed things up, we rented a tiny flat while strangers took over our home—loud, sweaty, smelling of paint and plaster. Among them was Steve.
Tall, rough hands, ice-cold stare. He reminded me of a younger David—his voice, the way he squinted when thinking. But while David had always spoken to me gently, even when angry, Steve shouted at his wife over the phone so viciously it made my skin crawl.
I’d never heard a man speak like that to the woman who’d given him two children. Through gritted teeth, dripping with resentment, like she owed him something. And then it turned out he had a girlfriend on the side.
Once, I popped back for some forgotten blueprints and caught him in the living room with some young thing. She giggled like a schoolgirl at his crude jokes, and then he grabbed her waist and pinned her against the unpainted wall.
And suddenly, I was terrified.
Not for her—for me.
What if David had some silly girl somewhere, thrilled by his attention like it was some grand prize? What if he’d been living a double life, and I was the last to know?
That night, I studied my husband over dinner, searching for the same indifference, exhaustion, that itch to escape. And then he suddenly asked:
“You holding up okay with all this chaos?”
Meanwhile, the workers had peeled away the old wallpaper in our little terraced house, and beneath it were traces of our early years. A faint pink stain—us drunk on bubbly after moving in, him lifting me up, me shrieking as the bottle slipped and half the champagne ended up on the wall.
The nail holes from that shelf David spent an entire weekend building while I was visiting my parents. “Don’t come in!” he’d yelled through the door as I laughed and stomped impatiently. The shelf was wonky but lasted a decade.
…Three days later, we went wallpaper shopping.
David, who usually left all decisions to me, suddenly came alive. Poring over shades, asking, “Which ones do you like?” No rushing, no penny-pinching—just choosing. For us. For our home. Running fingers over samples, murmuring,
“D’you think this pearlescent one will catch the light right?”
When we got to the bedroom designs, he reached for a pale blue with a faint silver pattern.
“Like that hotel in Brighton,” he muttered.
I gasped. Years before we married, on our first holiday together, we’d stayed up all night on the balcony listening to the sea. The walls had been that exact colour.
Later, in the furniture showroom, he insisted on a chair with a high curved back—“for your reading light.”
“How’d you know I needed that?” I asked.
“I’ve lived with you sixteen years,” he smirked. “Bound to have picked up something.”
No irritation in his voice—just warm, quiet fondness. The kind from our early days. And then I knew: he still loved me. It had just gotten buried under routine, under days blending into each other.
But it never really left.
“Let’s do the bedroom ourselves,” David suggested unexpectedly near the end of the renovation.
I blinked.
“But you hate wallpapering.”
“Hated,” he grinned. “Put up with it for our first flat, remember?”
Yes, under the weight of years, beneath the grind of daily life—that same man who once carried coffee across town in a thermos for me was still there. We’d just forgotten where we’d tucked each other away.
…Now we’re standing in the bedroom, and David, just like years ago, mixes up the top and bottom:
“Bloody hell,” he grumbles, “why do they make both sides look identical?”
I laugh and hand him a fresh strip. Outside, a summer rain falls, but my head’s full of memories. Us painting our first flat, David accidentally planting a handprint on wet walls. Him secretly redoing the wallpaper in my childhood room while I was at uni.
“Just need to finish by the 25th,” I say. “Toby’s back then.”
David nods, then suddenly takes my glue-smeared hand.
“Remember doing his classroom at primary?”
As if I could forget. Us, the Responsible Parents, volunteered to wallpaper. The walls had been painted, and we didn’t realise you had to strip that first. By morning, every strip had peeled off, mocking us. We spent hours scraping and redoing the lot.
“Proper cocked that up, didn’t we?” I smile, spreading glue.
David snorts.
“You swore you’d never—”
“—And yet here we are,” I finish.
His hands, rougher now, smooth each strip with care. Muscle memory, even after all these years.
“Just hope these stick,” he mutters, and we both wince, remembering that cursed classroom.
“We’re pros now,” I joke.
As he presses the last corner into place, it hits me: we’re not just fixing up a house. We’re making a home for our growing son to return to—and relearning how to be just us again.
Summer hums outside. Somewhere, a train carries our boy home. And here we are, surrounded by paint tins and memories, figuring out how to be husband and wife all over again.
But this wallpaper’s different. Just like us. It sticks. Like our imperfect, time-tested love—sometimes buried under daily life, sometimes resurfacing, like those stains on the walls bearing witness to our history.
Now we’re waiting for the renovation to end. Waiting to start anew.
In fresh walls. With an old feeling.
Maybe life’s like a renovation—first it feels like everything’s torn down, then you painstakingly rebuild. And beneath the plaster, those same people who once believed they could do anything are still there.
Proving a line from that old song right after all:
Everything passes, the joy and the sorrow,
Everything passes, that’s just how it goes.
Everything passes—just hold onto believing
That love doesn’t. No. Love doesn’t.
